Tuesday, June 22, 2010

The new alternative to VMware: KVM

Both the latest Ubuntu and the latest Red Hat are shipping with a new alternative to VMware Server called QEMU-KVM. I've been playing with it, and it is much faster and lighter weight than VMware Server, as well as being more flexible and easier to use.

To get started with QEMU-KVM on Ubuntu 10.04, first install kvm and qemu-kvm from aptitude. Then install virt-manager. After that, System Tools->Virtual Machine Manager will bring up your virtual machine management console.

You'll see two entries when you do this:

localhost (QEMU Usermode) - Not Connected

localhost (QEMU)

Double-click on localhost (QEMU) and it'll connect to the local root virtual machine manager. You could also connect to other machine's managers, if you're wanting to, say, manage the virtual machines on a host in your data center, by using File->Add Connection. Now you'll probably want to set up a data pool for use by your new virtual machines. Most of us put the virtual machines on their own partition, not on the root partition, but the default data pool is in /var/lib/libvirt/images -- which is on the root partition. Ick. Never fear, right-click on the localhost(QEMU) and select 'Details', then click on the 'Storage' tab when you get the details. Click "+" to add your new storage pool, once you define its location click the green 'play' button to make it active, then hit the red delete button to get rid of the 'default' pool. You now have a new default storage pool at the location you desire.

Okay, so you have your data pool, now what about creating a virtual machine? Easiest way to do that is to use an ISO image of your favorite distribution. Just right-click on the localhost(QEMU) entry again, and select 'New'. The resulting wizard is ridiculously easy to navigate as long as you remember that it's going to create it in whatever your enabled data pool is when you tell it to 'create a disk image on the computer's hard drive'.

So, after this you should be able to run the virtual machine and install your ISO on it. Remember that ctrl-alt gets you out of the QEMU console back into the regular Linux desktop environment, and you'll be fine. To open a console, just right-click and select 'open'. Or once you have a VM set up and installed, you can shut it

Okay, so what's the limits of QEMU/KVM right now? First of all, don't expect to run graphical environments via the normal console with any kind of responsiveness. It emulates a very slow/old display card which is then screen-scraped by a vnc server. KVM is mostly useful for running non-GUI setups, such as Asterisk servers or hosted virtual web servers. Secondly, some operating systems might not install at all into KVM due to driver support issues. Finally, there is no equivalent of "VMware tools" to integrate with your host environment so you can move your mouse freely between the virtual machine terminal and the host OS. Your best bet there, if you want a graphical console inside a virtual machine, is to install VNC in the virtual machine and then use VNC to view your graphical console.

But aside from those limitations, KVM appears to be working quite well. It is definitely better on Linux than VMware Server, and if you need to create a vmdk to import into VMware on some other non-Linux host, it's easy enough to just 'qemu-img convert -O vmdk VbAst32.img VbAst32.vmdk' and voila, the new virtual machine will import cleanly into VMware. And of course VPEP runs inside a KVM virtual machine just fine... :).

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About Me

I am a senior lead engineer and architect who has taken multiple products from concept to market and beyond. I am also one of the original Linux penguins -- my first Linux product hit the market in June 1996 and its latest incarnation is still running to this day.